Microsoft Has a Scheme for Getting More Bots to Run on Its Cloud

Microsoft said Tuesday that a forthcoming Azure cloud service will help developers build and deploy bots or chatbots easily. Bots, a hot, much-hyped topic of late, are pieces of software that work under the covers to let consumers perform tasks, such as ordering pizza, using their favorite chat or texting app.

Microsoft’s Azure Bot Service, now in preview, builds on the company’s previously disclosed Bot Framework, which aims to support all the popular chat and texting applications in the universe.

“This is a full application, a managed platform that does all you need to host a bot,” Microsoft executive vice president Scott Guthrie told Fortune.

The service relies on the newly available Azure Functions, which like the Lambda service from Microsoft msft rival Amazon Web Services, lets developers quickly build in capabilities that are triggered by a user action or some sort of software trigger or event. There are tons of uses for such capabilities in the connected world of devices, the so-called Internet of things.

For example, an Internet-connected button could be programmed to order milk or a ride from point A to point B. Microsoft and Amazon are vying to ensure that their cloud services are the ones facilitating those deceptively simple actions.

Developers can use Microsoft’s new service to build bots, basically, at no cost, the Guthrie said. “You can stand up a bot endpoint, we do all the challenging integration so you can publish through Facebook fb, Google, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Skype and you can use any programming language,” Guthrie said.

So basically developers can use whatever tool set or software development language they want, provided they commit to using Microsoft Azure to run the backend operations. Charges only apply when the bot is used.

Bots are a hot topic in an age of app overload. Why have different apps from Dunkin Donuts, Starbucks, Peets and every company in the caffeine-supplier universe if you can use an existing messaging app like Facebook fb Messenger to order from any of the above? Fewer downloads, less complexity, less app exhaustion is the selling point for those developing bot services.

Microsoft, like public cloud leader Amazon amzn and rival Googlegoog, wants to make its cloud the home base for software developers. And within software generally, artificial intelligence is a key focus of its effort. Towards that end, Microsoft also said that OpenAI, a non-profit research organization, will use Azure as its “primary” cloud provider. OpenAI is

Towards that end, Microsoft also said that OpenAI, a non-profit research organization, will use Azure as its “primary” cloud provider. OpenAI is backed by big name techies including Elon Musk; Y Combinator president Sam Altman; LinkedIn lnkd co-founder Reid Hoffman; and investor Peter Thiel. It aims to foster the safe use of artificial intelligence.

As the name implies, GPUs are specialized chips that are particularly adept at handling compute-intensive graphical workloads like visualizations and simulations. They are well suited for handling neural networks, a particularly complicated form of AI that tries to solve problems by mimicking the human brain.

An OpenAI spokesman confirmed that the “vast majority” of its AI and deep learning workloads are moving to Azure, but this is not an exclusive arrangement. The organization will continue to explore other cloud services on an “as-needed basis.”

One Expert Argues the Unicode Consortium Shouldn’t Govern Our Emoji

Emoji—those cute icons on your smartphone’s keyboard—have their own governing body, the Unicode Consortium. Every year, the consortium carefully reviews hundreds of proposals for new emoji, and approves a few of them.

But is that the best way to manage these fun little icons?

Keith Winstein, a computer science assistant professor at Stanford University, argues that it’s not. The consortium, which manages all language characters, currently has the power to make decisions that it shouldn’t have to make. For example, the consortium is currently considering adding some form of dinosaur emoji, which means it has to decide how many different ones, which dinosaurs, and even whether it should not add any further dinosaur emoji in future. But as Winstein pointed out during at presentation at Emojicon in San Francisco on Sunday, the consortium is made up of (very smart) technologists—not paleontologists. They’re not exactly qualified to sort through dinosaur types, he argues.

And that’s only one of the issues Winstein finds with the Unicode Consortium being tasked with managing the world’s emoji. To name a few, there’s also the influence from large companies like AppleAAPL and GoogleGOOGL, which are members of the organization. There’s the fact that Unicode doesn’t dictate how each emoji is represented, which is why one icon can look significantly different on an iPhone than it does on an Android phone, for example. This is because Unicode is only concerned with the “letters” of a language, but leaves the design part to font makers.

Moreover, as Winstein pointed out, popular online services like workplace chat tool Slack and microblogging service Twitter don’t even use Unicode for their emoji. They’re just images.

The Unicode Consortium was originally formed in 1991 to help promote the use of the Unicode standard. It only had to deal with language letters until 2010, when it decided to begin adding emoji following the rapid growth of smartphones.

Recently, Winstein was part of a group that presented to the consortium a way to relieve it from its governance over emoji, but it was (politely) shut down. The organization’s argument, which Winstein concedes is a fair point, is that people continue to submit proposals for new emoji and ask it to approve and manage the little icons, so it will continue to serve those requests from its community.

While there’s no sign that the Unicode Consortium will stop managing emoji, and the debate over whether it should still rages on, there’s good news: There are plenty of ways to go around the consortium’s approved official emoji. Developers have been creating stickers, which are small images similar to emoji, of thousands of diverse illustrations and millions of people use them to communicate everything current emoji can’t. We’re gonna be 👌.

Why Technology Has Not Killed the Period. Period.

There are punctuation symbols that have largely gone the way of the dodo. But while National Punctuation Day, Sept. 24, may be an occasion to pour one out for the pilcrow, that’s not the case for the period. Despite much yammering about this familiar little dot being on life support, or already dead, the period is here to stay for the foreseeable future. And a new analysis of text messages—a medium that is supposedly spelling the period’s demise—helps illustrate why.

“Periods are not dead,” says computational linguist Tyler Schnoebelen, who turned to his own trove of 157,305 text messages to analyze how the final period—a period at the end of a thought or sentence—was being used and shared his initial results exclusively with TIME. “They’re actually doing interesting things.”

These were messages that he sent or received over a period of about seven years with about 1,100 other people, and while he did notice that many of those texters severely declined in their use of periods over that time, he also found that there are a lot of reasons people are still double-tapping their smartphone screens. (Schnoebelen presents the caveat that this, of course, is just one man’s social network, but it also happens to be the largest linguistic analysis of SMS texting done to date, he says.)

One reason is structure. We’ve all gotten that loooooong text from a rambling friend, or jilted lover, or parent who apparently believes there are prizes to be awarded for Most Letters Used In a Single Sitting. Schnoebelen found that the lengthier a message was, the more likely it was to end in a period. While only 13% of messages that were shorter than 17 characters (about this length) ended in a period, 60% of messages that exceeded 72 characters got the period treatment. That’s about half the length of a maxed-out tweet.

Longer text messages, like news articles and novels and legal filings, need more punctuation and will continue to need it “because people would get lost without it,” as Schnoebelen puts it. And there is a natural tendency towards parallelism: If the text was long enough that we needed to use periods within it, it feels natural to plop another one on the end, even if text bubbles themselves often act as their own visual “thought stops here” indicator.

Schnoebelen also found that a period can be a signal of emotion. There has been much ink spilled about how the period, once neutral as water, now makes texters seem angry, irritated or insincere. And it certainly can connote all those feelings. Linguist David Crystal, who has lamented that his comments about language change got overblown by news outlets wishing the period better luck in the next life, gives a fine example:

John’s coming to the party [statement of fact]
John’s coming to the party. [Oh dear!]

But that gravity can also be kind, expressing sincere empathy when something bad has happened to a friend, or conveying the sincerity of your own feelings. Periods can help minimize the risk of looking careless or being unclear. Texts ending in a period, in Schnoebelen’s analysis, had a disproportionate amount of the words told, feels, feel, felt, feelings, date,sad, seems and talk. By contrast, many of the words that tended to show up in texts that did not end with a period were more casual kinds of speech:lol, u, haha, yup, ok, gonna. (lol, it’s worth noting, is arguably used as a form of punctuation itself sometimes, like emoji.)

As the world of people we text with continues to expand, from just our closest friends to our colleagues, our distant relatives, businesses, customers, and so on and so forth, punctuation such as the period will help distinguish the registers we use. Because it’s not just whatever medium we’re using that determines how formal our speech is: it’s also who we’re talking to on whatever medium. “Punctuation is a way to convey standardness,” Schnoebelen writes. “Not everyone who texts with you wants to be (or thinks they can be) colloquial with you.”

By contrast, he discovered that one of the more unlikely places to find periods was bouts of sexting. Much as a query like “Pardon me, but might I remove your pants?” would seem out of place in most bedrooms, so too does assiduous punctuating have potential to ruin the mood.

National Punctuation Day is a day meant to celebrate these marks and signals that we sometimes misuse or abuse or take for granted. And one of Schnoebelen’s findings suggests how much more they are than mere organizing splotches and lines. He found that people, at least in his texting world, often mirrored each other when it came to final period use, reflecting back the same kind of style of whoever wrote the text. That means, in their small ways, periods can help build relationships and underscore group identity.

Sure, a complete absence of punctuation could serve the same purpose. But this finding also suggests that so long as there are people using periods, there will be other people sending them right back from whence they came, coming full circle.

Time Is Running Out For This Popular Online Security Technique

So-called two-factor authentication is a must these days when logging into online accounts. Passwords aren’t enough—it’s much safer to also have to enter proof that you are in possession of a certain device that belongs to you, such as your smartphone.

The proof generally takes the form of a one-time code, generated or received by your phone or some other device, like a special security dongle. However, as Fortunenoted last month, it’s not so safe to have that code sent to you via text message, as services such as Facebook fb and Twitter twtr still do.

For that reason, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is now poised to ban the use of SMS-based two-factor authentication codes for services that plug into government IT systems.

In short, NIST wants people to use other, safer means for generating these codes—such as apps like Googlegoog Authenticator, or special USB dongles.

The institute signalled the shift in new draft guidelines, now open for consultation, that will tell the programmers of online services how to best implement state-of-the-art security.

Two-factor authentication using SMS is being phased out, or “deprecated” in industry jargon—it’s acceptable for now, but “will no longer be allowed in future releases of this guidance.”

Many banks and other operators of online services still send two-factor authentication codes to their customers via SMS. However, experts have known for years that there are vulnerabilities in the system.

For more on cybersecurity, watch:

People can call up your phone company pretending to be you, then convince the support desk there to redirect your messages to a different SIM card. Hackers can exploit flaws in the ancient SS7 protocol that underpins SMS, in order to fool the phone network into thinking their device is your phone.

If your adversary is particularly well-resourced, they may even have an IMSI-catcher—a device that appears to your phone as the normal phone network— in order to intercept your messages.

“Due to the risk that SMS messages may be intercepted or redirected, implementers of new systems should carefully consider alternative authenticators,” NIST’s draft reads. No kidding.

You’re Implementing This Basic Security Feature All Wrong

You’ve created different passwords for all your online accounts and set up a password manager to remember them all. You’ve also changed your passwords after all the recent hackings and implemented two-factor authentication, a tool that provides extra protection against breaches by requiring a second login code that is sent to your smartphone, for example, each time you sign on.

Nice job! This is the closest thing to hacker-proof you’ve ever been, right?

Hold the phone—literally. Because that last measure—two factor authentication—may have several vulnerabilities. The flaws here have to do with the way many Internet companies send security codes to your phone as part of the two-factor authentication process, as Wired points out.

Texts, or SMS messages, are not the ideal way to convey such information. Attackers can compromise your text-based two-factor authentication in a few ways.

First, they can do it through social engineering—in other words, by calling your mobile service provider and asking them to redirect messages normally delivered to your phone to one containing a different SIM card. You can help block this by calling your provider and asking to set up a PIN code on your account, where applicable.

Second, attackers can intercept messages using a device called an IMSI—or international mobile subscriber identity—catcher. The machines are not cheap, sure—but hey, maybe your enemies are well off?

And third, hackers can exploit weaknesses in the protocols that allow telecom carriers to exchange data between networks. That became clear earlier this year after 60 Minutes aired a segment on Signaling System 7, one such vulnerable protocol.

The good news: there are alternatives. Instead of using a two-factor process tied to your mobile device’s SMS, consider downloading and implementing a separate two-factor authentication app. These apps generate random numbers on your device—time-based one-time passwords—that are coupled with your online accounts. Examples include EMC-owned emc RSA SecurID, or Googlegoog Authenticator.

For more security advice, watch:

Now I know what some of you are probably thinking: this level of security must just be for the paranoids. Well, maybe.

Security is a risk based decision. But if you would like to be proactive, go ahead and make the change where you’re able. In this humble reporter’s opinion, it’s worth staying ahead of the attack curve when possible. Because when the lions approach, you don’t want to be the straggler left sipping at the watering hole.

This isn’t just a theoretical weakness, after all. Black Lives Matter activist DeRay McKesson had his Twitter twtr account taken over, apparently by a hacker who duped someone at Verizonvz into authorizing a fraudulent SIM card. Political activists in Russia and Iran have had their Telegram accounts hijacked. Even Lorrie Cranor, chief technologist of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, got scammed.

If you’re an online business, here’s the takeaway: offer your users a non-SMS two-step login method. Besides, you might be keeping privacy-conscious users—ones who don’t wish to part with their phone numbers—from protecting their accounts.

For the rest of the Internet’s denizens: if you haven’t set up two-factor authentication, do! Even in the absence of an app-based option, you still should. SMS-based two-factor authentication is better than nothing.

Bots, or chatbots, are computer programs that mimic human conversations online. If you’ve interacted with a bank’s online support site, you’ve talked to a bot. But increasingly, people are interacting with bots using their favorite mobile phone chat applications to perform tasks instead of downloading a ton of separate apps, a process that has driven many to distraction.

Waterloo, Ontario-based Kik points to Pervasive Group research showing that the average teenage Kik user spends 74 minutes a day on the app. So if you’re one of the zillion marketers targeting that demographic, where you gonna go? Microsoft msft clearly sees the advantage in courting that group.

As mentioned, one big rationale for the bot explosion is that bots let consumers use their preferred chat or messaging apps to communicate with lots of different online services. Instead of downloading a zillion one-off apps for ride sharing, food delivery, or shopping, they can use their favorite app to communicate with all of them. Facebook fb is fully aboard, and Google goog reportedly will unveil it’s bot game plan at its annual developer show, Google I/O, later on Wednesday.

Kik’s teenager demographic is really important for Microsoft which, after all, is now a rather senior member of the tech society. Microsoft applications do not scream hipness. Which in some quarters is part of their charm, but I digress.

“We think our younger demographic is a key advantage because we get to build experiences for the only mobile-first generation in the U.S.,” said Rod McLeod, a spokesman for Kik. “We get to reimagine the whole experiences and build exclusively for teens; we think teens are similar to Chinese consumers where they skipped desktop completely and went straight to mobile.”

Kik’s world view, he added, is that chat is the new browser and bots are the new web sites. The advantage to Kik, on the other hand, is the Microsoft relationship will expose its bots and audience to a wider array of developers and perhaps bring Kik bots into the enterprise.

Twitter Said to Be Considering Changes to the 140-Character Limit

Twitter is planning to make changes to its 140-character limit, a restriction the service has had since its inception in 2006, according to a report from Bloomberg. Sources told the financial wire service that Twitter is expected to announce sometime in the next two weeks that photos and links included in tweets will not count towards the 140-character limit.

Links currently take up 23 characters of the total 140 available, and it doesn’t matter how short the links are because Twitter “wraps” every link with its own auto-shortened URL. Twitter says it does this so that it can cut down on malicious links and also track how many times people click on them. Photos also take up 23 characters worth of the 140 limit.

The Bloomberg report is just the latest in a series of rumors about Twitter expanding its character limit that have swirled around the company over the past six months or so. In January, for example, the news site Recode said Twitter was planning to expand the number of available characters for a tweet to 10,000 in an attempt to appeal to new users.

“It’s staying. It’s a good constraint for us, and it allows for of-the-moment brevity,” Dorsey said. But at the same time, Dorsey’s comments (posted as a screenshot) seemed to leave the door open for a feature that would allow people to post longer chunks of text but still only show 140 characters in the Twitter timeline.

Twitter users have already found a number of ways around the 140-character limit, including posting screenshots of text. Media companies are also given the ability to implement “expanded tweets” or Twitter “cards,” which allow them to include links that automatically expand within the Twitter stream to show an excerpt from the story and an image or video.

The 140-character limit was designed in the early days of Twitter because Dorsey expected most people to send tweets using the SMS text-messaging function on their phones, and many carriers at the time restricted text messages to 160 characters. Twitter declined to comment on the Bloomberg report.

Someone then requested log-in codes for the activists’ Telegram accounts, which the service sends via SMS. With Kozlovsky and Alburov not receiving their text messages, that someone then intercepted the messages containing those codes.

Alburov is an anti-corruption activist, and Kozlovsky has organized trips to Ukraine for journalists and activists.

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov sees the episode as evidence that Russia’s security apparatus have started pressuring local operators without court orders. “Democratic countries typically try to avoid intercepting SMS without a court order, because such measures are highly visible and can lead to public uproar,” he told the Financial Times.

Markus Ra, Telegram’s spokesman, told Fortune that the activists should have used the app’s two-step verification process so the attackers would have needed to enter both passwords and login codes in order to access their accounts.

For more on encrypted messaging, watch:

“Our investigation showed that MTS did not deliver the codes to the users’ devices,” Ra said. “We’ve introduced two-step verification to our apps more than a year ago to avoid exactly this kind of scenario.”

Fortune repeatedly tried to get through to MTS’s media relations department, but was not successful.

As Big Companies Move Email to the Cloud, Microsoft Shows Strength

Here’s a news flash: Microsoft, the company that dominated big corporate email systems in the pre-cloud era, has a healthy start in the cloud epoch, at least among big companies.

New Gartner it research holds that among big companies surveyed, Microsoft msft Office 365 holds 8.5% market share compared to 4.7% for Google goog Apps for Work, which has strong traction among startups and smaller companies.

But perhaps more interesting is that the bulk of big companies haven’t made the cloud move at all. Nearly 90% of the companies surveyed worldwide, still use on-premises email or some other, presumably legacy option. Many use email hosted and run by another company. When Gartner last tracked the on-premises email market back in 2012, before cloud options hit big, Microsoft Exchange Server led the category with more than 80% market share.

To get the new cloud numbers Gartner researchers looked at the public mail routing information—the email server addresses listed in company’s domain records—of some 40,000 public companies worldwide.

Phew.

While the overall share numbers may not overwhelm anyone, the progress Microsoft and Google have made in the market is worth noting, Gartner analyst Nikos Drakos told Fortune.

Generally speaking, the perception that Microsoft does better in big companies while Google does well in smaller concerns held up. Microsoft Office 365 was used by more than 80% of companies that use cloud email and that have more than $10 billion in annual revenue. Google, on the other hand, was used by 50% of the companies using cloud email that have less than $50 million in revenue.

Microsoft also did better in companies that focus in regulated industries—like utilities, energy, and aerospace companies. But Google does very well in software companies, retail establishments, advertising, media, consumer products, and travel industries, according to the numbers.

In the old model, big businesses paid up front for an enterprise license for the email server software, which typically ran on company-owned hardware and was upgraded every three years or so.

That is shifting to a “Software as a Service” world in which customers pay a fee for each user per month, although they still typically pay at least for a full year up-front. And now, the software runs in Microsoft or Google data centers, and those companies handle all the hardware, software, and networking upgrades so the customer doesn’t have to sweat them.

There are lots of caveats here. First, the fact that the providers are running the email doesn’t mean perfect performance. as some recent embarrassing outages from both vendors attest.

Second, the move to cloud adoption—whether that means software-as-a-service options like Office 365, or to public cloud infrastructure like Amazon Web Services, is still very much in its very early days. A lot can happen.

For more on Google, watch:

And, it’s worth noting that Amazon amzn, which is the biggest provider of public cloud infrastructure, just made its own business email WorkMail product generally available last month. It’s far to early to gauge any uptake yet, but it bears watching.

More broadly, email is a technology that’s had its epitaph written many times over the past decade. People were (and are) overwhelmed with spam and phishing attacks. Other technologies like SMS and text messaging were going to kill it; then curated messaging products like SocialCast, Slack, or Jive were going to give it the heave-ho.

But for all that negative commentary, most normal humans still need to get and send email. Email, despite all the reports of its imminent demise, remains a mission-critical application, Drakos told Fortune.

Brad Brooks, co-founder and CEO of TigerText, a 5-year-old secure messenger startup based in Santa Monica, Calif., has staked his business on a thesis—a plain observation, really—that he believes will revolutionize the healthcare industry: People prefer to text.

So he and his brother Andrew — a co-founder of TigerText who sits on the company’s board and is a certified orthopedic surgeon — have set out to revamp medical communications.

“People are already gravitating toward SMS,” Brad Brooks tells Fortune. “But it’s not really a viable solution” when it comes to healthcare, he says, given the industry’s need for secure, encrypted channels, authentication processes, and enterprise-level controls over networks and users. So, that’s just what TigerText has developed: a tool that “ring fences,” as Brooks says, the text messaging experience. Plus, it adds a useful application programming interface that software developers can build upon as well as a self-deleting messages feature.

TigerText plans to announce that it has closed a Series C round of funding worth $50 million. The company last raised $21 million in January 2014, bringing its total funding raise to date to more than $80 million.

The latest investment was led by Norwest Venture Partners and included participation from Invus Group and Accolade Partners as well as return backers Shasta Ventures, OrbiMed, and Reed Elsevier RDLSF.

Robert Mittendorff, the Norwest partner and certified physician who led his firm’s funding round, says he ran a three-year search on 15 companies before deciding to back TigerText. “There aren’t many of these companies founded by individuals that have built or scaled companies in the technology and media space and are also a physician,” he explains, referencing Brad Brooks’ former post as president of DIC Entertainment, the late children’s-branded media company that had spun out of Disney DIS, and his brother’s medical background.

“We think of TigerText as the Slack of healthcare,” Mittendorff said, referencing the multi-billion dollar “unicorn” chat app startup that has taken less strictly regulated industries such as media (Fortune’s office included) by storm.

Other companies that have designed chat tools with healthcare specifically in mind include Imprivata IMPR with its Cortext messaging product and Voalte, a private communications software firm based in Florida.

Asked whether he is concerned about the increasingly crowded field, Brooks says he believes there is space for multiple options. “There room for more than one player,” he says, adding: “I can’t spend time thinking about competition, it’s just about execution.”

TigerText has about 150 employees, roughly half of whom are engineers, and has doubled or more than doubled its revenue each year for the past three years, Brooks says. It more than 250,000 paying customers across more than 5,000 facilities, he says, and four out of the top five largest for-profit health systems in the U.S., including United Health Services UHS use the tool.

Most of the new funding, he says, will be reinvested in “TigerConnect,” the company’s Twilio-like customizable API product that allows developers to integrate the company’s secure messaging across a host of services, and thereby enabling health providers to communicate more flexibly.

“A lot of the growth forward is around TigerConnect,” Brooks says. “We’re seeing so many people migrate to SMS and need to make it a more managed form of communication—that’s where we come into play.”

Follow Robert Hackett on Twitter at @rhhackett. Read his cybersecurity, technology, and business coverage here. And subscribe to Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily newsletter on the business of technology.